As computing devices become increasing ubiquitous in personal, industrial, corporate and governmental settings, the interoperability between the various computers and other data processing devices becomes increasingly important. In aerospace, homeland security and defense settings, for example, increasing emphasis is being placed upon “network centric operations” that leverage information-sharing between aircraft, vehicles, command centers, robotic devices and/or human-operated computing devices to accomplish a desired task such as identifying a target, gathering intelligence data, engaging an enemy or the like. As a result, future defense and aerospace technologies will be increasingly reliant upon information sharing and interoperability between widely differing computing systems. Similar emphasis on interoperability between disjoint systems is occurring in aerospace, industrial and other settings, as well as in the commercial marketplace.
While several robust technologies effectively support data sharing and other forms of interoperability between certain types of computers, these commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products are primarily oriented toward personal computing or commercial enterprise environments. As a result, most COTS interoperability products do not support certain features commonly found in specialized defense, homeland security and aerospace systems. In particular, many defense and aerospace systems operate in environments that can impose significant spatial, electrical and weight restrictions. As a result, many of such systems use dense computing techniques to produce significant computing capability even when limited space, volume or power is available. In the aerospace field in particular, hard real-time processing capabilities such as digital signal processors (DSPs), field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and the like have been widely adopted. While dense computing and hard real-time technologies can provide significant computational ability within the established environmental constraints, these specialized features can be difficult to integrate into a large inter-network suitable for network centric operations and the like.
Accordingly, it is desirable to create a framework that allows systems having specialized processing capabilities to readily integrate into a larger operating environment without sacrificing access to the specialized capabilities. In addition, it is desirable to adopt COTS interoperability solutions in non-traditional settings to enable network centric operation and the like. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background section.